The Forest of Enchantments Read online

  To my three men

  Murthy, Anand, Abhay

  for teaching me love

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  TEN YEARS AGO, AFTER I published The Palace of Illusions , my novel on the Mahabharat told in the voice of Panchaali, many readers asked me what I would write about next.

  Usually that’s a question to which I have no answer, not for many months. I’m the kind of writer whose imagination must lie fallow for a while before it can come up with a topic into which I can throw myself body and soul.

  But this time, I had my answer already.

  I’m going to write the story of Sita, I said, because I’ve always been fascinated by the Ramayan. Just like Panchaali, my Sita (yes, with the presumptuous intimacy of authors, I thought of her as mine) will tell her own tale. She’ll fill in the gaps between the adventures undertaken by the male characters in the epic, their victories and defeats. She’ll tell us what inspired the crucial choices that directed the course of her life. What she believed in. What interested and moved her. How she felt when faced with the deepest of tragedies. And what gave her the ability to overcome them.

  People thought it was a great idea. How long will it take, they asked.

  Oh, maybe two or three years, I said blithely. I’ve already started on the research.

  We’ll be waiting eagerly for it, people said.

  Two years passed, then three, then five, then seven. But my Sita novel didn’t get written.

  I wrote other books, contemporary novels set in India and America. They featured complicated women protagonists, some strong-willed, others downright stubborn, making waves wherever they went and suffering the consequences. I admired these heroines and thought of them as very different from Sita. Wasn’t she, after all, good and meek and long-suffering, bearing her misfortunes with silent stoicism the way the perfect Indian woman was supposed to? Wasn’t that why, when our elders blessed us, they said: May you be like Sita? And wasn’t that why that statement always angered me?

  The truth was, I didn’t know how to write Sita’s story. I wrote the other books because they were easier, and because I was afraid of tackling what I knew, deep down, to be the most challenging project of my life.

  But I couldn’t give up on her either. Sita’s story haunted me. Because it was one of the first stories I was told, and because I sensed there was a disconnect between the truth of Sita and the way Indian popular culture thought of her. I sensed that Sita was more than what we took her to be. But who she was I didn’t yet know.

  Then, suddenly, a dear family member had to be rushed to the hospital and, as I waited by his bed in the ICU, the lesson that life is brief and fragile was brought home to me as never before. By the time we got back home, the incident had changed me. I knew I had no time to lose. I dropped my long resistance and returned to my research with a new urgency. I read the Valmiki Ramayan and the Adbhuta Ramayan and the Kamba Ramayan and, my favourite, the Bengali Krittibasi Ramayan from the fifteenth century. I discovered folk songs about Sita, or those addressed to her. I realized that there were many portraits of her, each different in a significant way. It gave me the courage to write my own version.

  As I researched and meditated on my findings, I realized three important things.

  One: Sita may be the incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi but, having taken on a mortal body, she is human, too, with human failings. As is Ram. The Ramayan is filled with instances of their human emotions. They love, they grow angry or confused, they weep, they miss each other to the point of heartbreak, they are afraid. They even joke about things. Sometimes Sita longs for what she can’t have, or what’s bad for her. Sometimes, like all of us, she says things she later regrets deeply. Ram loves Sita so much that, at a crucial moment, he can’t say no to her even though he should. At other moments, he cares too much about what his subjects think of him. He becomes hostage to his desire to be the perfect king, which leads him into an action that will break his heart as well as his beloved’s.

  Two: Sita’s choices and reactions stem from courage, though often it is a quiet courage, easy to mistake for meekness. It is the courage of endurance, of moving forward in spite of obstacles, of never giving in. It is the courage that has been reflected for centuries in the lives of women. Hers is the courage that speaks its mind at vital points in her journey, no matter what the cost—just as Indian women are now doing. In the final amazing and heartbreaking moments of her life, Sita demonstrates this courage that refuses to compromise, no matter how much is at stake.

  Three: The story of Sita and Ram is one of the greatest and most tragic love stories—not just in our Indian culture but in the world. There was a time when I’d believed that, in order to care for Sita, the reader must end up hating Ram. But that is too simplistic. As I wrote The Forest of Enchantments , the novel became a meditation on the nature of love. I hope that, while focusing on the many wonderful, exciting and surprising layers to Sita’s character, I’ve simultaneously been able to portray Ram as the complex being that he is: noble, earnest, devoted to his wife, but beset by challenges of his own and forced to choose between his public role of king and his private role of husband and lover.

  As I send The Forest of Enchantments out into the world, I ask for the benediction of Sita, goddess, daughter, sister, lover, warrior, mother—and a role model for women all over the world. I pray that the novel lodges deep in the hearts of readers regardless of their gender; for Sita’s story has much in it to inspire and console us all.

  And, finally, I hope that it brings new meaning to that old blessing: May you be like Sita.

  Prologue

  TWO DAYS AGO, THE SAGE handed me the tome he had been composing for decades.

  ‘It’s my life’s work,’ he said, and a strange look flashed across his face, one I wouldn’t have expected. It was part shyness and part desire for approbation. But why should the great Valmiki want approval from me, a queen bereft of her kingdom, a wife rejected by her husband at the height of his glory? I had come to Valmiki’s hermitage having lost everything except the babies I carried inside me. I was forever in his debt for the refuge he’d given me at that most crucial moment.

  ‘I’d like you to be the first to read it,’ he said, ‘before I give it to your sons to sing. After all, it’s your story, too.’

  I glanced down at the palm leaves in my arms, a hefty stack, reaching higher than my heart. A shudder went through me, sorrow and longing and fury and love, as I saw the title: Ramayana . The story of the glorious king Ram. My husband.

  I stayed up through the night and the next night in my thatched hut at the edge of the ashram, reading. The oil in the lamps burned away without my noticing. In the next room, my fourteen-year-old sons awoke at the smell of scorched wicks and came to ensure that I was safe.

  Lav, always protective of me, took me by the shoulders and said, ‘You must sleep, or you’ll make yourself ill. What’s so urgent that it can’t wait until morning?’

  But Kush, the perceptive one, touched the dried salt on my cheek with a gentle finger and said, wonderingly (for it had been years since they’d seen me so distraught), ‘Ma, why are you weeping?’

  I kissed their heads, my boys balanced on the precarious edge of manhood, and sent them back to their beds with words of assurance, but I didn’t lie down. Morning came. Wind whispered in the trees—mango, coconut, jackfruit—that I had planted around the edges of the ashram in the early years, when I needed work to distract me from my grief. On the riverbank, I heard the voices of the ashram dwellers greeting the sun with prayer. The purest notes were those of my sons, for they were adept at both weaponry and song. I waited until the assembly was dispersed, each to his or her task, and then I took the manuscript back to Valmiki.

  The sage looked at me, curious.

  ‘It’s very good,’ I said. ‘The poetry is superb, the descriptions sublime, the rhythm perfect. You’ve captured the histories of earth and heaven both, the adventures and the wars, the weddings and the deaths, the betrayals and the farewells, the palace and the forest.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But,’ I said, and I couldn’t keep the anger from my voice, ‘what occurred when I was alone in the darkness, under the sorrow tree, you don’t know. You don’t know my despair. You don’t even know my exhilaration, how it felt—first in the forest and then in Ayodhya—when I was the most beloved woman in creation.’

  ‘I wrote what the divine vision showed me,’ he said.

  ‘It must have been a god that brought it to you, then, and not a goddess,’ I said drily. ‘For you haven’t understood a woman’s life, the heartbreak at the core of her joys, her unexpected alliances and desires, her negotiations where, in the hope of keeping one treasure safe, she must give up another.’

  I expected anger, for he’d lavished a lifetime on this book. But not for nothing is he called maharshi, great sage.

  ‘You must write that story yourself, Ma,’ he said, ‘for only you know it.’

  He took out a new sheaf of the pounded leaves, a set of quills—items precious and hard to come by in our forest retreat. He called to an apprentice to carry his writing table to my room. He rummaged in a chest and handed me a sealed bottle of ink.

  ‘Hurry,’ he said. ‘Time grows short.’

  I walked to my room, shaky with possibility and trepidation. Time was, indeed, short. All these years my husband—yes, to my chagrin I still thought of him as such—had left me alone to raise my sons, allowing me, if not happiness, at least a tenuous peace. But now the planets were shifting. Everything was about to change again.

  I barred the door and sat cross-legged on the ground, and arranged the palm leaves on the table. Outside, I could hear Valmiki teaching my sons how to sing the epic, where to raise their sweet silver voices in affirmation, where to whisper dark and shiveringly of the treachery of rakshasas, of human failings. They’d be performing it soon, if his vision was true—and I both feared and hoped that it was—in front of Ram, King of Ayodhya, the father they’d never met. The man who had banished them to the forest for no fault of their own even before they were born. If Valmiki’s vision was true, soon I, too, would be facing him. Ram: monarch, father, warrior, husband. The beloved who abandoned me when I needed him most. My greatest joy and my greatest despair.

  But I had a task to complete before that. I took a deep breath and touched the first palm leaf to my forehead, invoking Saraswati, goddess of creativity serene on her white swan, though a part of me wondered what she could know of my very human tribulations. I unplugged the inkpot and was startled to see the colour the sage had chosen for me. Red. But of course. How else could I write my story except in the colour of menstruation and childbirth, the colour of the marriage mark that changes women’s lives, the colour of the flowers of the Ashoka tree under which I had spent my years of captivity in the palace of the demon king?

  I picked up the quill and closed my eyes. I knew what I must do: travel back to the beginning, to the moment I met Ram. Become again the girl I’d been on that day, burnished with innocence, believing that goodness and love were armour enough. That was where I had to start.

  But as I dipped my quill into the inkpot, they rose inside me. Voices. Some clamouring, some tentative, some whispering, so that I had to still my breath to hear them. Kaikeyi, second queen of Ayodhya, who wrested our throne from us out of blind devotion to her son, only to be hated by him for it; Ahalya, her beauty turned to stone by a husband’s jealous fury; Surpanakha, wild enchantress of the forest, whose gravest crime was to desire the wrong man; Mandodari, wife to the legendary demon king, forced to watch her kingdom fall into ruin and her beloved son perish because of her husband’s obsession with another woman; Urmila, my sweet sister, the forgotten one, the one I left behind as I set off with blithe ignorance on my forest adventure with my husband.

  Write our story, too . For always we’ve been pushed into corners, trivialized, misunderstood, blamed, forgotten—or maligned and used as cautionary tales.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to them. ‘Yes, I’ll write your stories as best as I can, for without them, mine can’t be complete.’

  I set quill to leaf. In red ink I began to write—in crooked, effortful lettering because it had been so long since I’d composed anything—the Sitayan.

  One

  THE DAY THAT WAS TO change my life started like any other.

  I walked through the extensive gardens of my father, King Janak, revelling in the feel of the soft grass, beaded with the dews of dawn, on my bare feet. I was accompanied by the chief gardeners, for I was the overseer of the palace arbours, an unusual duty for a princess. They pointed out problems they’d been unable to solve: a gnarled champak, refusing to flower; a rare harshringar, shrivelling up no matter what they tried; a copse of bamboos with black rot creeping up their stalks.

  I stroked leaves, dug around roots, breathed prayers. Behind me, I could hear the awed whispers of the gardeners. Amazing; miraculous; look, they’re already healing; I tell you, she’s the earth-goddess herself , appeared straight out of the ground just to bless us .

  They exaggerated, of course. And although I’d told them clearly that I’m human, just like them, their veneration seemed to increase every year.

  ALL THIS WAS BECAUSE of how my father found me. Yes, found. Though by virtue of my upbringing I was a princess, Sita, eldest daughter of the house of Mithila, in the kingdom of Vaideha, no one knew who I was by birth.

  Father told us the story many times. It was one of my favourites, and my sister Urmila’s as well.

  The morning I was found, he’d gone to till the field beside the palace, to level it for a yagna that was to occur soon. He was fond of holy ceremonies and liked to participate in their preparation. If destiny hadn’t placed upon him the duty of governing his people, he would have happily spent all his time at the feet of a rishi, listening to a treatise on the nature of the Supreme Reality.

  That day, however, only a few steps into his ploughing, he was forced to a standstill. A baby lay in his path, naked and newborn, glistening in the young sun as though it was a mirage. He was amazed that I didn’t cry, regarding him instead with unblinking eyes. I’d kicked off the cloth that swaddled me, a gold fabric finer than anything our Mithila weavers could produce, with strange and intricate designs the likes of which no one had ever seen. Believers said the gods had gifted me to the good king, who was childless in spite of years of effort. Sceptics wondered which cunning person had placed me there, at just the right moment, to be discovered by Janak. It must have been someone who knew my unworldly father well, they whispered. Other kings would have had the child removed without considering her fate. At best they would have ordered for her to be brought up in a servant’s home. But my saintly father picked me up and held me to his chest. And as he did so, a great hunger within him was assuaged, and he was at peace.

  This was my first lesson on the nature of love: that in a moment it could fulfil the cravings of a lifetime, like a light that someone might shine into a cavern that has been dark for a million years.

  The power of love. It fascinated me from an early age. I thought about it often, even though I didn’t quite understand what it was.

  MY STRANGE GIFT WITH plants was a mystery to me. Perhaps it was because, like them, I was earth-born. Maybe for the same reason, when I touched a plant, I knew its healing properties. I could tell which grasses cured headaches and colds, which seeds fended off infections, which herbs to give women when their monthly blood flowed too long, and which potions healed the shaking sickness or gladdened a long-depressed heart.

  And so, after my garden walk, I made my way to my other responsibility: the healing house adjoining the palace.

  Our servants were the first to learn of my abilities and to seek my help. My queen-mother Sunaina, who was more concerned than delighted, tried to keep my skill a secret, but news travelled. Soon, people suffering from diseases deemed incurable would drag themselves across the country to the capital, begging to see me. They needed a place to stay, and finally my mother, accepting defeat, built the healing house.

  Today I examined many of the sick, and instructed the physicians on the administration of unguents and potions. Finally, I moved to the hall of the dying, which was always difficult. At my touch, they grew quiet and breathed easy, and some did not open their eyes again. Only one man, who had been in unbearable pain because the karkat disease clutched him with its dread claws, grabbed my hand and touched it to his forehead, whispering that word again . Goddess .

  ‘I’m no goddess,’ I said to him sadly. ‘Otherwise I would have saved you.’ But he was gone already, a faint smile lingering on the edge of his lips. I closed his eyes, sighed, and turned to leave. I was late for my secret lesson in the martial arts.

  THOUGH I NEVER WOULD have confessed this to my family for fear of hurting them, I often wondered where I’d come from. Because what called to me most powerfully were the forests that I could see from the palace turrets. Raincloud-coloured, mysterious, full of stories, they pushed up against our kingdom from every side.